Why is there no ‘Plan B’? The perils of planning for the worst

"Authorities don’t prepare for the alternatives because they can’t bear to think of the consequences of the alternative. And they’re convinced that if word ever got out they were even thinking of that alternative, their original plans would be threatened."

Why is there seldom a Plan B and, if there is one, why is it so often ignored?

It’s a question that comes up every time there’s a financial crisis, a natural disaster or a health emergency. Never so relevant as today, as the world struggles to fight the coronavirus pandemic, threatening nations rich and poor with devastation, both human and economic.

Well into March, as the virus was raging through Italy and Spain after leaving its path of devastation in China, organizers of the Tokyo Olympics were still insisting that there was no plan to postpone the Games from their planned date at the end of July.

“There will not be one bit of change in holding the Games as planned,” said Katusra Enyo, deputy director of the Tokyo 2020 Preparation Bureau at the City of Tokyo. “There is no thought of change at all in my mind.” Thomas Bach, the head of the International Olympic Committee, insisted there was no Plan B. “Neither the word ‘cancellation’ nor the word ‘postponement’ was even mentioned,” Bach said on March 4, a line he continued to follow for another two weeks until the IOC did the inevitable. It postponed the Games.

How could there not be a Plan B for a $12-billion event? If it was not going to be impacted by a pandemic, what about disruption from terrorism? The outbreak of conflict on the Korean peninsula?

The problem is not uncommon. Authorities don’t prepare for the alternatives because they can’t bear to think of the consequences of the alternative. And they’re convinced that if word ever got out they were even thinking of that alternative, their original plans would be threatened.

It’s a natural human response, learned in childhood. If you block your ears and hum loud enough, somehow you think you can block out that irritating music or the nagging voice of a parent telling you to do something you don’t want to.

I can remember speaking with a friend who was a senior federal bureaucrat during the 1995 Quebec referendum, when Canada came within a hair of breakup. Did Ottawa have a Plan B if the Yes side had won the vote? No, he told me: “We have just-in-time government in Canada.”

The problem was that if word ever got out that Ottawa was planning for a possible breakup, including planning on touchy issues like citizenship, the debt, and free movement of people, it would lead to even more tension and possibly chaos. And the separatists would benefit. Better to stick to the conviction that Canada would remain united and hope for the best. If the vote went the other way, Ottawa would try to figure it out.

Even when careful plans are made for the worst-case scenario, those plans are often ignored. Here are a few reasons why:

Memories are short. It’s unbelievable how quickly human memory fades. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific, killing tens of millions across the globe. But it quickly receded from collective memory, overwhelmed by the loss and grief that had resulted from the First World War and the need to rebuild society. And within two decades, there was another world war. The Spanish Flu became a relic, its lessons forgotten except by some historians or epidemiologists.

More recently, outbreaks like SARS in 2003 and Ebola a few years ago grabbed headlines, then faded. Politicians who had vowed big changes moved on and their successors were preoccupied with other pressing issues. Public health officials may have continued to make their case for better preparation, but it became harder to convince the public of the immediacy of the danger.

We often plan for the last disaster. It’s understandable, but we often plan for the most recent catastrophe. So when the 2008-09 financial crisis took place, authorities spent the following years solidifying the banking system to avoid systemic threats, raise capital levels and so on. In other words, making sure that 2008 wouldn’t happen again.

But as with war, the next conflict is never the same as the last one. The financial crisis this time is completely different, sparked by a societal crisis, not the fundamental soundness of the financial system. Some of the reforms from post-2008 will help but many are irrelevant.

Nobody can think longterm: In her 2017 annual report as Ontario auditor-general, Bonnie Lysyk reported that the province’s health ministry had a stockpile of 26,000 pallets of supplies for medical emergencies, including respirators, face shields and needles that had been purchased at a cost of $45 million, presumably after the SARS outbreak. Eighty per cent of the supplies had reached their expiry date.

The report said that the vast majority of these supplies hadn’t been used in the health care system before expiry because the budget “only allowed for storage and not for management of them.” But the ministry didn’t even throw out these supplies. It was continuing to store them at a cost of $3 million a year. How that was cheaper than using the supplies is my big question.

What’s interesting here is that the auditor-general saw this solely as a waste of money and didn’t deal with the fact that the stockpile, which had been created for a reason, had become essentially useless.

So instead of creating a system for a stockpile to deal with emergencies, with constant renewal of the supplies to make sure nothing went to waste and updating them to make sure it was current, the stockpile was regarded as a one-time event that was easily forgotten.

Our political system only exacerbates these problems. The minister who authorized the stockpile was probably long gone, along with top officials, so they had no stake in its continuation.

We’re scared of crying wolf. The problem with preparing for the worst is that when the worst doesn’t happen, we think all the spending on preparation was a waste.

Remember Y2-K in 2000? The world’s governments and corporations spent hundreds of billions of dollars over fear that the arrival of the new millennium would screw up old computer systems and lead to havoc at banks, utilities and governments. In Canada, thousands of troops were put on standby. In the end, nothing really happened.

One could say that costly preparations for Y2-K had paid off. But many people believed it had all been a costly waste of time. Likewise in 2009, when the H1N1 influenza pandemic proved not much more destructive than the seasonal flu. Rather than being considered a success, much of the public believed it was another case of crying wolf.

This time, the sky really is falling. Let’s hope that lessons are learned for the next time but unfortunately, I’m not sure they will.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Alan Freeman is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.